For Finnagora the most popular event of the year has for the last ten years been Finn Filmnapok, the Finnish Film Days. With this year's pandemic there are new preparations to consider, but even if the event would be online the fact remains that Finnish movies will once again be screened in February to the Hungarian audience. We, the organisers, are very excited to be able to bring absolutely outstanding movies to the Hungarian audience and to celebrate Finn Filmnapok’s 10-year anniversary.
In February the 3rd-7th we will again be at Toldi Mozi screening Finnish movies. This time we will have a bigger program and after the festival ends, we will screen Finnish movies online for three more days! We want to use this new platform to give the people outside of Budapest also the opportunity to enjoy Finnish cinema.
And besides the festival being 3 days longer, we will already start showing Finnish movies on the 9th of December through Toldi Mozis Remote Cinema. We want to introduce the Hungarian audience to some Finnish Classics and the 9th of December we begin with “The White Reindeer”. The movie won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953 and a Golden Globe Award in 1956 and is a very well known classic in Finnish Cinema. The movie is shown the 9th of December at 19:00 and is completely free, no tickets needed just to go to the website: https://film.artmozi.hu/ and view the film.
“The White Reindeer” shows the beautiful Northern Finnish landscape and is about a woman who seeks the help of a shaman to help her in her marriage. This “help” leads to her becoming a shapeshifting witch-like creature. The movie has very little dialogue and is mostly told with images and music.
It’s a lot of fun to be an organizer for this festival and of course even if there is now some added worry with the pandemic, in the centre of the festival is as always the movies and the creators behind them. The art of moviemaking and the storytelling medium hasn’t changed much since the 1950’s and the themes that moviemakers discuss are universal and don’t need national borders to be understood. It’s almost an honor to be able to see a movie and the vision the creator has had and to then have your own impression of the creation. I hope you as the viewer will not only come and see a movie, which you are welcomed to do as well, but also truly experience the movie and open up to the piece of art you are witnessing.
You will have plenty of opportunities this year to experience Finnish Cinema, be it classic movies, new movies or something in between. We will offer drama, tears, laughter, reality through documentaries, heightened exaggerated worlds, fantasies, lies, dreams and much more through the medium of cinema.
Welcome again to Finn Filmnapok and keep yourself posted by following Finn Filmnapok on Facebook and don’t forget to go to https://film.artmozi.hu/ the 9th of December at 19:00 to start your Finnish Film viewing.
Written by: Rebecka Vilhonen, Event- and Communication assistant at FinnAgora